5 minute wonders: From zero to hero with AppHarbor

added by troyhunt

10/31/2011 9:27:32 AM

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AppHarbor is one of the hottest things to hit .NET since, well, just about ever. It packages up the entire app lifecycle of source control, build, deployment and hosting and makes it dead simple; in fact it couldn’t be easier. It then adds a comprehensive collection of add-ons to do everything from persisting data (MS SQL, MySQL, MongoDB) to caching services (Memcacher) to load testing (blitz). Here’s how to get up and running in only 5 minutes flat.

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2 comments

vijayst

10/31/2011 9:27:29 AM

How does AppHarbor compare with TFS 2010? Is it open-source or just free?

troyhunt

10/31/2011 4:38:57 PM

Totally different kettles of fish. AppHarbor is an extremely light weight means of doing continuous integration and deployment. You're very limited in configurability to basically just having whatever you publish pushed straight out to the live site (or doing it on demand). But that's also kind of what makes it so cool; it's just so simple and does what you actually need it to do extremely efficiently.

Dedicated CI tools like TFS and TeamCity have a huge array of features beyond this; issue tracking (TFS), code quality build runners, code coverage metrics and on and on and on.

AppHarbor works great for my personal projects which are lightweight and highly agile. TeamCity works great for my enterprise projects that need a heap of configurability and real CI power.